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May 31, 2007

This week's Economist (May 26, 2007) has a story about the book industry and a sign of the future, and the country they highlight is Japan.

Now we - Alan and I - obviously are authors. Like very many other authors we share concerns and curiosities of what will become of our profession and product in a digital age. In my time we've gone from book manuscripts being delivered in print - my first book Services for UMTS and its publisher John Wiley & Sons (the world's largest publisher of engineering books) was right at the time going from printed manuscripts to electronic delivery (and that was mostly by diskette, not e-mail delivery). That manuscript was worked on in 2000 and that book was among the early ones by Wiley where the author delivered the full manuscript in electronic form. Certainly not the first, but so much still an innovation that my publisher was very pleased I could deliver the manuscript as a file and quite amazed I could do it in e-mail rather than mailing a computer diskette to the publisher.

That discussion was seven years ago while the internet was already "in full swing" and we had things like Napster eating into the music industry and its content. Perhaps book publishers felt insulated from the digital invasion.

Meanwhile other print mass media formats, newspapers and magazines found ever more threats from the internet, as did their major revenue source, advertising. But books seemed to be "safe". Stephen King released a book in digital form that he was selling by the chapter, that he didn't even finish (I believe, or else it was very much delayed and compromised before being terminated). Books seemed to be safe.

But books also started to appear in digital form. Many expensive printed reports (the kind that cost thousands of dollars each) started to appear in electronic form, via the internet. And some publishers started to experiment with more innovative digital formats and methods. That was one of the things that drew Alan and me to Futuretext to publish this book, Communities Dominate Brands, because if our book was about communities dominating, and sharing and viral marketing - then surely shouldn't the book have a chapter we could share for free with any prospective buyer. Like in launching this blog and the podcast, Alan and I wanted to practise what we preached. We wanted to have something that could be shared with our community, about our book on community. To us that made perfect sense. When we discussed this with traditional big publishers, they didn't want to do that fearing it would limit their sales (we discussed with several traditional publishers). But Futuretext saw the value in this, and allowed us to do it. That discussion was in 2004 when we were negotiating the contract to publish this book project. That was 3 years ago.

Still today I mail out several copies of our first chapter to people who haven't yet read the book - any of the people who read our blog - obviously - have had the right to receive that first chapter (and the foreword to the book by Stephen Jones the Chief Marketing Officer of Coca Cola) - and yes, even you - if you send me an e-mail to the regular address tomi at tomiahonen dot com - I will send you the pdf file with the first chapter, foreword and first Case Study of our book.

But this is the direction for even the 500 year old book publishing industry. An industry which had been "stagnant" for a couple of hundred years. But suddenly all of it is in turmoil. Not because of sending one chapter of a book. No, now books are fully digitally scanned by Google and copyright owners are challenging Google's right to put full content available and searchable. Used books are resold on Amazon within weeks after their original release. New authors can self-publish paperback books for a tiny margin above basic print costs and have print runs in the dozens, not even hundreds, and still call themselves published authors. And yes, like we reported, there is already auto-authoring software that will take a blog and turn it into a book. Yes, the book publishing industry of today is in very serious turmoil.

So just like we saw in music, gaming, newspapers, magazines, TV, movies, advertising etc - the digital revolution first appears on the internet (and then explodes to be much greater on mobile) But what of the tomorrow for books?

The Economist shows us the future for books, authors, publishers. And yes, our readers know it. For all the impressive power of the internet, which will continue to grow into the foreseeable future, the long term BELONGS to mobile. And that future already exists in Japan. The Economist:

"With sales of books in decline, a new market has come as a godsend to Japan's publishing companies. Sales of mobile-phone novels - books that you download and read, usually in installments, on the screen of your keitai, or mobile phone - have jumped from nothing five years ago to over 10B Yen (82 Million USD) a year today and are still growing fast."

Of course. If music goes mobile and earns more today than music online, if gaming goes mobile and earns more than online, if social networking goes mobile and today already earns more than online, if news, radio, TV, movies, advertising, banking, credit cards etc all are trending towards mobile, all the other mass media are heading to mobile - OF COURSE books will go there too. It just took a while for the industry to get the formats right.

Like we say repeatedly about Mobile as the 7th Mass Media channel - don't try to copy old media onto mobile. Invent the new. Mobile is not the dumb simple little brother of the legacy internet; no! mobile is as different from the internet as TV is from radio; and like TV can do all radio can do - but then much more radio cannot, so too with five unique benefits no other digital media can replicate, mobile can do everything that the internet can do, but so much more that the internet cannot hope to match. Of course books are migrating to mobile.

But five years? This is why it took Japan so long. First they tried to put existing bestselling top titles in print, to mobile (don't try to copy the old media to the new!!!) The Japanese were not paying for those, because the same titles were available in discount book stores for pennies. But create original new stories, written with that novella concept, shorter stories, and with a lot of passion etc, but unique content released first for mobile - that sells. So well, in fact that the bestselling mobile authors in Japan get their titles THEN published as printed books (and TV shows, movies, comics etc).

And yes, lets stop a moment and think about the money involved. 82 million dollars per year in books sold to mobile phones and still growing strongly in Japan. There are 90 million mobile phones in Japan. So averaging across the whole user base, BOOKS sold to mobile phones earn 90 cents per mobile phone subscriber per year.

Lets assume this will be copied everywhere (trust me, even if you think Hello Kitty or Sumo Wrestling will never migrate beyond Japan, this innovation of mobile books certainly will). Now multiply 90 cents across 2.8 Billion mobile phone users in the world today, May 2007. That is 2.5 BILLION dollars that the global book publishing industry could earn from mobile. For an industry worrying about declines in readership and diminishing cover prices and ever smaller print runs, 2.5 Billion starts to look very good. In particular if this is NOT cannibalizing any existing sales - on the contrary, this creates NEW superstar authors for PRINT books.

The Economist explains about the economics of book publishing. It is a HORRIBLY inefficient system today. Very much of the costs of books are wasted in extremely inefficient distribution. One bookstore has a stack of books of one title nobody buys. Another bookstore not far in the same city has run out. Books are very heavy and moving them from one store to another (and stocking them) is extremely expensive. Books have a short window of popularity so stores have to "guess correctly" and overstock to meet likely demand - and this always results in some titles being left unsold in a given store. An to add insult to injury, unsold books are sold at big discounts soon after the orinal title was released. So it is not even in the boostore's interest to hold onto an old title and keep its price as it was.

A very inefficient delivery system and massively destructive pricing system as a book once read can easily be resold as used, for example via Amazon.

But with mobile books, there is no bottleneck, no overstock, understock. No extra copies printed to be sold at a discount. No lost sales because the book was not available. And MOST importantly, the mobile books cannot be resold by the person who bought the book. So if you want to read the latest Harry Potter or whatever, you cannot borrow it from a friend, you need to buy your own. (oh, obviously you could try to borrow your friend's phone, ha-ha, but since 60% of married people won't even share their mobile phone with their husband or wife, its that personal, no chance of someone lending you their phone just so you can read the book you have on the phone)

All this means that the books can be "produced" MUCH cheaper than printing them to paper. The publisher and author can get a fair return on a book that costs MUCH LESS than traditional paper printed books. And the reader, the buying public, gets original, exciting, new content, by their fave authors, first-time released direct to mobile. No waiting in lines, ordering books that are on back-order, etc. And they cost less. Win-Win-Win. Is it any wonder this has taken off?

May 30, 2007

This is another example of the global contagion effect of digital connectedness. An example of something that works in one country - like Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs describes the protests in Manila Philippines where protesters coordinated their behaviour with SMS text messaging - then spreads around the world.

The French protests a couple of years ago when they burned all the cars - were coordinated by the protesters using SMS. We've seen protesters around the world exhibiting the same Smart Mob behaviour.

Now we learn on CNN that the protesters in Venezuela who are demonstrating against the closing of the popular TV station, are coordinating their movements via SMS. Where do we need to be, where is the police right now, etc. That kind of communication. Yes, once an idea is spread into the digital world, it can't be extinguished.

This took me by surprise. Alan and I write a lot about virtual reality - we have a chapter on it in the book Communities Dominate Brands and the childrens virtual playground Habbo Hotel is one of our case studies in the book. So we celebrate the growing importance of various elements around MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) avatars and various virtual worlds. But a news item on CNN just a moment ago had me paying attention. Sweden launching an embassy into Second Life?

And a quick search of related news finds that Sweden isn't even the first real country to set an official representation inside Second Life. The island nation of Maldives opened their embassy a few days before Sweden did. So yes, virtual worlds are converging very rapidly with the real world. For more on these embassies see this story Sweden and Maldives embassies in Second Life.

I have been lucky. Its not that I am clairvoyant, its simply because I've been exceptionally lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Literally, the absolute total best place in the right time. To understand mobile.

In 1995 I joined Elisa Corporation (who own Radiolinja the world's first GSM mobile operator, Helsinki Telephone the fixed line operator of Helsinki, plus internet, international etc telecoms services) and at Elisa, which was one of the world's first telecoms operators with fixed and mobile assets, I was assigned the project to develop our fixed-mobile convergence product in 1996. Finland was far ahead of the rest of the world in mobile phone adoption at the time when Finnish mobile phone penetration had reached 30% per capita. As I was the project manager for our fixed-mobile service - and no other countries even had meaningful enough mobile phone adoption to make such a service worth their while - I not only created the world's first fixed-mobile service eleven years ago; I was also exposed to all the internal data on mobile and fixed telecoms adoption back then, on the early trends of mobile call usage and the incredible trends in SMS text messaging etc.

I have been lucky to be in the right place, literally, in the world where this first happened. So then it was easy to see the trend in 1997, so that in 1998 when Finland became the first country where mobile phone density was higher per capita than fixed landline phone density, that was no surprise to me. I had seen the signs from observing the data. As Finnish mobile phone penetration numbers and mobile telecoms minute usage and SMS messages sent were then repeated across Scandinavia - often with only one year's lag - and then soon thereafter in Italy, Israel, Portugal, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK etc - it has served me remarkably well as a crystal ball. As Finland goes, so soon goes the rest of the world.

So far every forecast that I've made in technology, on a trend observed in Finland and copied in at least one other advanced country in telecoms, has then happened just about everywhere in the industrialized world. And I've learned for example that one of the telecoms big industry analyst houses, Ovum, used the Scandinavian early SMS usage for their first SMS forecasts, which were remarkably accurate at the time for other European countries. This is a legitimate tool for forecasters, using a country or region or market as an early indicator of how a given technology will be adopted. Its easy to seem smart if you have access to all the facts first...

So its time to give you readers some more "first facts from Finland". The EU has released its E-Communications Household Survey report for 2006 by Eurobarometer. And again we find some very remarkable numbers around telecoms and Finland.

ABANDONING FIXED LANDLINES

We've reported on this trend in the book and at this blogsite. But Finland continues to lead the industrialized world in how households are now abandoning the fixed landline and using only mobile phones in the household. That is not news. But the extent of this truly is. Finland has just become the first country in the industrialized world where more households have only mobile phone connections than have fixed landline connections. During 2006 the proportion shifted so that today 46% of Finnish households have a fixed landline and 54% of Finnish households don't have a landline but do have a mobile phone. Note that of the 46% with a fixed landline, 40% have both a fixed landline and a mobile phone connection in the household and only 6% of Finnish households have a fixed landline but no mobile phone connection.

So more than half of all households (54%) have totally cut the cord. 40% have both a fixed and mobile phone (or phones) and only 6% of households have a fixed landline but no mobile phones.

Someone might say - but Tomi, you've reported earlier that Finland has over 100% mobile phone penetration, how is this possible that now suddenly 6% don't have a mobile phone. Yes, remember we normally talk of mobile phone subscriptions per capita. Measured against the population. By that measure the European average is 105% penetration, Finland is at 110% and the European leader Italy is at 125% (according to Informa). But also Informa tells us that 28% of the population has two or more phones. So in some Finnish households of four - father, mother and two teenage kids - there might be six mobile phones - both teenagers with one phone each and the parents both employed and thus mostly would both have two phones. But also in Finland there could be a retired couple of two 70 year olds, who both are still without mobile phones, and they do have one fixed landline in their home.

And to be clear - the EU report states clearly that of all EU countries, Finland leads in how many households have mobile phones. Only 6% have no mobile phone but have a landline. In the Netherlands and the Czech Republic that number is 7%, Italy is at 8% and Sweden at 9%. So even where there are 125 mobile phones to every 100 Italians alive today from babies to 101 year olds, still 8% of Italian households that do have a fixed landline phone do not have mobile phones.

Still, these numbers keep shrinking (as the elderly population is slowly converted to be mobile phone users and the rest of them slowly die away).

Ok, so we are talking about households. But yes, Finland leads in this number as well - the first country where more households are 100% mobile phone connected, than have a fixed landline at all. And is this a trend? For sure. Last time we reported it, out of the industrialized world Portugal was second to Finland, and Portugal back then had 30% of its households already abandoning fixed landlines. Today Portugal is already up to 36%. Austria and Italy have jumped ahead of Portugal, with 39% and 38% respectively. Belgium is already at 32% and the EU average is already 22% of households who have totally cut the cord. Yes, Finland is leading and the rest of the world is following. Our regular readers will remember that even in the USA over 10% of households have gone totally without landlines relying only on cellphone communications.

Also while I'm at it, let me mention Eastern Europe. There the fixed landline penetration was never at or near 100% so with poor landline penetration, the mobile connectedness of households was very quickly more than landline penetration. Czech Republic, Estonia and Lithuania are also in that group of European countries where more households have mobile only connections than landlines.

No payphones...

Some funny impacts come out of these kinds of trends. The first is that old staple of the telecoms industry, the trusty payphone. A decade ago the payphone was a regular component in the love-lifes of teenagers about the town. But today, if "everybody" has personal mobile phones, who needs payphones. Again Finland leads. The European average is 12% of households have at least one member who uses public payphones. Leading countries where payphone use is vanishing? Estonia and Netherlands 4%. Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia and Cyprus are down to 3%. But the clear leader, Finland 1%. No wonder they are shutting down the payphone networks. Nobody uses them anymore.

More broadband than fixed landlines

But probably the most astonishing statistic is this one. Many telecoms experts suggest that broadband will be the innovation that "saves" the traditional fixed landline telecoms industry. Maybe so. But remember where Finland leads, the rest of the world follows in telecoms. Today Finland has become the first industrialized country which has more broadband connections than fixed landline telecoms connections. Yes, 46% of Finnish households have a fixed landline telecoms connection, but 49% have a broadband connection. How is this possible? There are more ways to connect to broadband than telecoms xDSL connections, such as cable modems, 3G/3.5G cellular and WiFi/WiMax etc. Yes, we were expecting this statistic for about the end of 2006, and it did happen. Today more Finnish households have a broadband connection for intenet than have a fixed landline telecoms connection.

Can broadband save the fixed landline telco operators/carriers? It looks pretty bleak actually. And for those who say "but but but, PC penetration, internet usage" etc - yes, same study reports Finland has third highest PC penetration in Europe with 81% of households with at least one personal computer and fourth highest internet penetration per household. And also while we are on the sad state of health of the legacy fixed landline telecoms operators, lets look at internet telephony, so-called VoIP Voice Over Internet Protocol, services such as Skype and Vonage etc. Finland is tied with France for second among Western Europeans with 24% of households using VoIP (Denmark leads with 25%).

So what do we learn from this? Yes, very soon the majority of households in all of the industrialized world will abandon the fixed landline altogether. Those who do have a landine it will mostly be used for broadband, but also broadband penetration will soon exceed fixed landline penetration. And if your job is repairing payphones, I'd urge you to quickly seek re-education.

PS - I've also written another of my Thought Pieces. This one is about the size of the worldwide mobile industry (an update of the blog about 2.7 Billion mobile phone users around the world) with stats and sources etc about mobile content, SMS text messaging, phone replacement cycles, second subscriptions etc. If you want a free copy of that Thought Piece, please send me an e-mail to tomi at tomiahonen dot com.

May 28, 2007

We've been looking at news media evolution at this blog and we discuss media evolution to great extent in our book Communities Dominate Brands. But since the book we've had some interesting data emerge.

News of today

One that caught my eye was the consumption patterns of media according to ITU's Digital life survey for 2006. The ITU tells us that over 55 year olds spend 31.5 hours per week with traditional newsmedia (print, radio and TV) and only 8 hours with modern digital mass media (mostly the internet). Older people spend twice as much time in front of a TV set as on digital media, and digital media gets the same level of usage as radio and print

Young people ie under 35 year olds, by contrast spend only 25 hours with all the three major forms of legacy media and already 16 hours per week with interactive media. Digital totally dominates the other media. Young people spend 50% more time on the internet as TV, twice as much as on the internet as on radio, and four times as much time on the web as in print media.

News of yesterday

Now lets look at the newsmedia giants of the past. First if we look at newspapers, these have seen a continuous decline in their importance for a long time already with radio and TV shifting news consumption for decades, but recently the internet has accelerated the problem. As we told you two years ago, there already are forecasters who suggest newspapers as a newsmedia will become extinct within our lifetimes, in the blog Last Newspaper April 2040?

So where is news headed? You could be forgiven for thinking "obviously" news is heading to the internet, the PC based internet as we know it today. You would be wrong. News has existed on the internet for over a decade, but still today, news content on the web is having a horribly hard time convincing its audiences to pay for that content. It is seen as without intrinsic value. Only a few branded news sites, like Wall Street Journal and Financial Times with their business news, are able to generate some revenues out of paid news. So the internet newsmedia will be more akin to free newspapers in major cities around the world.

Where is news headed? Check out i-Mediai-Channel on NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Mobile is the 7th Mass Media channel. As one of the unique benefits of mobile as the newest media is that it is always connected, mobile is exceptionally suited for news delivery. And as mobile is the only mass media that is always carried, this enhances its ability to deliver breaking news. Cue Japan:

NTT DoCoMo launched its i-Channel news service in 2005. This service was a "news ticker" like the CNN news ticker on the bottom of the TV screen, which scrolls breaking news headlines onto the idle screen of the mobile phone. This is a service that the phone owner could customize. Someone wants sports news, another wants financial/business news, another wants international news, and another wants the celebrity gossip, while yet another wants pop music news etc. But the breaking news delivered to the phone, displayed always when the phone is in idle mode, for example on a table or desk as we work etc.

And better than typical newspaper or TV content, when you find a headline that is interesting, you can click on the headline and get more news about the story, including pages of text, pictures, sound and video (depending on story obviously). A far superior news experience to getting news on radio, TV or the newspaper because the user can select how much more information - and in what format, some news is better read in text such as statistics; other news is better seen in person and sometimes we can't look at the screen but want the news - ie if driving a car or jogging etc and want to only get the news read to us.

And here is the kicker. The service is NOT free. Japanese consumers are charged 200 Yen (1.70 dollars) per month to view i-Channel news. And any clicks to further news stories are then charged per page viewed or clip downloaded on normal mobile news rates. So how is it doing in Japan? 18 months from launch, by January 2007, Wireless Watch Japan reported that i-Channel was already subscribed by 8 million paying subscribers on NTT DoCoMo's network. An adoption rate of 16% of all subscribers on that Japanese wireless carrier/mobile operator.

And observe, this is not a sexy 3G/TV/iPhone service. It is a most basic, simple, almost to the level of text-messaging-basic type of service. Yet rapid adoption and customers totally willing to pay for it.

Alarm bells anyone? i-Channel is not a free service. Its a paid service, and 16% of Japanese phone users already signed up for it. Like we say, mobile is the fastest of the mass media and the only one that is always carried. There are compelling reasons why it is emerging as the most powerful news media channel. The only interactive mass media where such volumes of consumers are willing to pay for monthly subscriptions to the service. And at 163 million dollars of annual revenues just from i-Channel alone, this is the kind of new media content and service that ANY news media boss would love.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion, and spoke much the same language. And, at regular intervals, these very similar people, possessed of very similar values, would cheerfully go and watch some of their number being burned alive at the stake, or slaughtered with swords, because they were deemed to possess the wrong brand of Christianity.

British values, whatever they are, won't hold us together

Which is something we discussed in What comes after Communities Dominate Brands?

In contrast, politics has been professionalised and managed down to the last detail. There is no room for risk. A Radio 4 Today interview is often about testing out the political skills of evasion and unflappability. We are not being provoked to reflect, but to witness a gladiatorial contest of wits. The consequence is that some of the most fraught political controversies of our time are migrating into art. In the case of Mark Wallinger's State Britain, this is literally true. One of the entries on this year's Turner prize shortlist - which is billed as the most political ever - State Britain is a re-assembly of more than 600 of the posters and objects of the anti-war protester Brian Hawes that were forcibly removed from Parliament Square in 2006. Now they're sitting in an art gallery.

So we struggle for the role of what our individual identity means and what this means in terms of a national identity. A few years ago I created a project that explored these deep issues. I think a government could be part of such an intitiative but a brand could also play a meaningful role too. Particuraly a mobile phone company. We did talk to one about the possibilities of a big idea that transcended all media channels, but they decided that spending millions of ££££ on the Power of Now, as more interruptive communications made more financial sense. Its almost as insane as the big shots at the music companies refusing to engage with file sharing and the implications of living in our digital universe.

So what could or should be done?

But there are at least three practical things that could be done, which are long overdue. First, a standardised, chronological history of Britain should become part of the national curriculum. This history need not be built around the reigns of monarchs. It need not obscure the cultural and political differences between Wales, Scotland, England and Ireland, although it should draw attention to the persistent and powerful connections that have always existed between them. And it certainly does not need to be insular, or remotely reactionary. For good and for ill, Britain has had more to do with the rest of the world over the centuries than most other countries. Schoolchildren need to learn, for instance, that 18th-century Britons were the world's leading transatlantic slave traders, and that in the 19th century Britons and the Royal Navy took the lead in a global campaign against slave trading. But most of all, schoolchildren need to learn. For how can they grow up to be British citizens if they haven't a clue how Britain came to be what it is?

And without context there can be no meaning. In a country of mixed history and cultures, points of view, needs and desires – we do need to re-evaluate what we are and where we are going. Engagement is how we do this.

In the debate that ensued from I argued

networked societies have the means to affect and effect change. Or as Jörgen would say transformation. Elected body politics, and organisations, are all built on the heireachical model of industrial processes which do not allow an indiviual a voice in that process. As much as those incumbent organisations would argue otherwise. Today, we can have a voice and we can play a meaningful part in that process, if we so choose and desire to do so.

Reductionist vs. Holistic.
The idea of group forming networks extrapolates this theory, and negates the role of conventional institutions or even governments and oveturns the idea of even countries. For Northern Europeans for example, our stories and culture are dramatically altered by immigration. For me the Second World War plays a defining role in my identity as an Englishman and what it means to be English. However, there are many people now that cannot define their identity through this history. I don't mourn such a loss, I just observe that today its different.

The story of immigration – what role do immigrants play and how do they shap their identities in a post modern world in their adpoted countries. Think of the Dutch story told through the book Infidel. Where is the voice for these people, and how do they become part of the body politic? They must become part of civial society and the democratic process.

Witness the riots in Paris in 2005 - this was a community which was frustrated in its seemingly endless existence at the frayed edges of French civial society. How do we give them "a world that changes solely on the communicated wishes of individuals and groups?"

File-sharing has holed the record industry below the waterline. says The Observer

On a blazing hot day in California five years ago, the boss of Yahoo, Terry Semel, rose to his feet to address a technology conference in which he lambasted record companies for being 'paralysed' by the threat of online music.
Semel's words were met with rapturous applause from an audience made up largely of new media executives from Silicon Valley with a vested interest in the digitalisation of music.

The timing of his words was significant: the music industry had just succeeded in shutting down Napster after a court ruled it should stop offering pirated music over the net. The Napster case infuriated Semel and others who believed that the music majors were showing a lack of imagination about how the market could expand via new technologies.

Its fascinating to me that few people really looked into why people were file sharing? What were the opportunities of living in a digital world? And of course mobile is just around the corner. Well in fact its not its here already preparing to deliver another devasating blow to our analogue world.

Critics say that instead of embracing the internet by hiring visionary and innovative individuals, the firms turned to their lawyers in a fruitless attempt to crush illegal downloading before it could get off the ground.

Chris Parry, founder of radio group Xfm and Fiction Records, says: 'Of course the industry has a duty to protect copyright, but for too long executives were fixated by the idea of selling CDs via a retail distribution network. Legal challenges are legitimate, but the majors should also have taken the initiative by recruiting people who were internet-savvy. Few did so at the time.'

And that is the point. In our white paper on mobile being the 7th Mass Media SMLXL writes

About eight to ten years ago, if someone mentioned to any major media executive companies called Google, eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo, most would not have known what these were. AOL did exist, but was known as more a discussion service, a "bulletin board" internet and e-mail company. Today they form the five biggest Western companies on the internet. About eight to ten years ago most media executives would have had serious doubts about the internet becoming a serious threat to their TV, newspaper, magazine, motion picture, radio and music publishing companies. Napster shook up music, and today all traditional media are concerned about the internet and digitalization of their content.

Within this context you wonder what those highly paid executives were doing. And of course the Genie is out of the bag. The Observer article reflects on rampant illegal file-sharing

According to the IFPI, the international music industry lobby group, 40 songs are being downloaded illegally for every legal download. Put another way, they say 20 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2006 and the situation is set to worsen following the spread of broadband to eastern Europe and other emerging markets.

These digital technologies of co-operation as Howard Rhenigold describes them, can be used as effectively for good as well as not so good causes. But the fact remains they exist, and they are potent. So, one has to sit down and say - How can we effectively use these new technologies? How can we create value with these new technologies? How can we create something that people really want to be a part of and share with their friends?

May 25, 2007

So you have read the book, followed the blog and listened to the podcast? Now attend the one-day short course that could be called Communities Dominate Mobiles

Alan and I are proud to join our friend Steven Jones to announce the first university short-course on Mobile Social Networking, at Oxford University on July 3.

You've seen Business Week, Economist and Time tell us that the future belongs to social networks and digital communities.

And while traditional media from newspapers (Guardian blog) to TV (American Idol/Pop Idol voting) are moving to social networking in general; the leading social networking sites are now expanding to include mobile such as Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Flickr, Ohmy News etc.

Services which have multiplatform strategies are finding users and traffic migrating rapidly to mobile, such as we've reported tracking the dating/flirting service Flirtomatic.

Meanwhile mobile-only communities are emerging such as the remarkably popular SeeMeTV which is like YouTube but which pays the original video creator for every time his or her video is watched by someone in the community. This is the power of social networking as it learns to deal with the unique benefits of Mobile as the 7th Mass Media channel.

So if you are a regular reader of our blog, have read the book and seen or listened to the podcasts, where can you get the best, latest, more complete picture of what is happening at the cutting edge of social networking - mobile social networking?

The one-day course at Oxford University was set to specifically deal with that. With our good friend Steve Jones of the3GPortal, Alan and I will be sharing our best insights of digital communities and how they now are starting to embrace mobile.

We will feature a lot of real case studies and statistics and examples including all your favourites from the book and this blog. But rather than snippets here and there - or the short seminar you may have seen Alan or me present - now you get a full day with us and our favourite topic.

BOOK NOW TO GET EARLY DISCOUNT

The course is held at idyllic Oxford in the beginning of July. And best of all is the price. As this is our first time this course is run, it has a special early booking price of only 295 UKP (450 Euro, 590 USD) !!But that price is available only through June 3 (then it goes to the normal price of 345 UKP)The course fee includes courese materials, and lunch and refreshments. We'll even give everyone attending a free autographed copy of our bestselling book Communities Dominate Brands.

The course is non-technical, focusing on the strategic and business dimensions involved. If you like our writing here, you will love this course.

If you need to understand the mobile dimension of social networks, user-generated content, citizen journalism, engagement marketing and digital communities, this is the course to attend. Or if you feel some on your staff need to understand these concepts, send them to this course.

And those CEOs and MDs and senior execs reading our blog, and any HR people also out there lurking, this course - like any of the short courses for executives that Oxford Univeristy runs at its Continuing Education Department, can also be brought to your premises, anywhere in the world, for modest fees. Its MUCH cheaper than typical conference or training providers. So please contact us if you would like to explore bringing this course to your staff at your offices. My e-mail is as always tomi at tomiahonen dot com.

ALSO TV COURSE FOR MOBILE

And as a small further comment, if social networking is not really your core interest, but you want to understand how video and TV will work on mobile, including latest findings from the Oxford DVB-H trial and South Korean DMB experiences etc, then Oxford is re-running my 3G TV and Video short-course from last year, on July 2. That course is presented together with James Parton of O2 who ran the Oxford Trial. This course was fully subcribed last November and received very high reviews. So if you want to understand how MTV or BBC or Big Brother or Nokia or Vodafone or YouTube might find their business on the 4th screen in our pockets, this is the course to attend. It costs only 345 UKP (475 Euro, 690 USD). And as it is on July 2 and the Mobile Social Networking is on the next day, you can of course take both courses and still spend much less than a typical one day at a standard conference or workshop.

Note, most DVB-H, DMB, MediaFlo, video streaming etc mobile TV training is very technical. This is NOT technical. This course focuses on the strategic and business dimensions involved. You don't need to be an electronics engineer to understand this course. But yes, if you enjoy the level of our discussions at this blog , you will enjoy this course too.

This is what our participants were saying last year:

"Really good focus on the business challenges." - Stephen Chandler, Project Manager, O2

"Good insight into what is happening globally in this space." - Oisin O'Connor, Head of Mobile Products, Eircom

May 24, 2007

One of my fave programmes is the Late Show with David Letterman (a late night talk show on CBS in America, also shown here in Hong Kong). David has a recurring segment they call "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches". It always starts with Roosevelt's "The only fear is fear itself" and then JFK's "Ask not, what the country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." And then they play something that George W Bush has recently said (obviously selecting the most hilarious bits). On Tuesday night's edition, they showed a short President Bush clip where he - to my observation probably for the first time - mentioned the blogosphere. Wow, gotta give him credit for that. But does he really get interactive media? See what he actually said:

"Information is moving, you know, nightly news is one way of course, but its also news through the blogosphere and the internets." - President George W Bush

The interNETS ? Plural ? Is GWB really that well aware of the web that he really understands intranets and extranets? Or did he memorize a sentence with things he does not understand, and simply fumble the last word? Information moves through the blogosphere and the interenets. Almost, Mr President, almost...

May 23, 2007

Our very good friend David Cushman over at Emap is one of the main contributors to the Faster Future blog about the future of media and so on. We often exchange thoughts with David via e-mails, over at Forum Oxford etc. He had a posting last year which I missed, but I'm very happy he revisited that thought this Monday in his posting Famous for 15 People. David takes the Andy Warhol comment that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes, and changes it that we all will be famous for 15 people. And it is a very powerful concept.

Not like broadcast TV if we happen to be interviewed in front of the fire of a building we were passing by and Channel 3 news crew interviewed us for a moment. Famous for 15 minutes. But rather with modern digital communication methods we can discover small, "Long Tail" type of audiences who can give almost anyone a micro audience, in some cases really that small as 15 people, or like in our case at this blog (we are one of the 20 best-read blogs in mobile telecoms for example) where we usually only get a couple of hundred visitors on an average day.

This is how David puts it at his blog:

Once, the idea of mass media was to reach ‘everyone’.... When everyone can be famous for 15 minutes, what is the value of fame? A brief, non-immersive relationship with anything has little value.

Consider how that applies to content or advertising, or customer relationships. If you are assaulted by a parade of interruptive ‘sells’ they become a passing blur (quite literally in the case of the fast-forward button on your PVR) none of them registering, none of them engaging.

Far better to be fully engaged with a small number (a niche – and please don’t take me literally on the ‘15 number’…) than to broadcast to a billion who are looking the other way. This is the lesson of the long tail.

Very, very good thinking David. I will let it brew around my head and see what it brings. Meanwhile I'd recommend all of our readers to visit David's blog and read both this current posting, and the previous one from last autumn when he originally suggested the idea.

Available for Consulting and Speakerships

Available for Consulting & Speaking

Tomi Ahonen is a bestselling author whose twelve books on mobile have already been referenced in over 100 books by his peers. Rated the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in December 2011, Tomi speaks regularly at conferences doing about 20 public speakerships annually. With over 250 public speaking engagements, Tomi been seen by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents. The former Nokia executive has run a consulting practise on digital convergence, interactive media, engagement marketing, high tech and next generation mobile. Tomi is currently based out of Helsinki but supports Fortune 500 sized companies across the globe. His reference client list includes Axiata, Bank of America, BBC, BNP Paribas, China Mobile, Emap, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM, Intel, LG, MTS, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Ogilvy, Orange, RIM, Sanomamedia, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Three, Tigo, Vodafone, etc. To see his full bio and his books, visit www.tomiahonen.com Tomi Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on next generation mobile and digital convergence. Follow him on Twitter as @tomiahonen. Tomi also has a Facebook and Linked In page under his own name. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements and as expert witness, please write to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com

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Pearls Vol 1: Mobile AdvertisingTomi's first eBook is 171 pages with 50 case studies of real cases of mobile advertising and marketing in 19 countries on four continents. See this link for the only place where you can order the eBook for download

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Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2009A comprehensive statistical review of the total mobile industry, in 171 pages, has 70 tables and charts, and fits on your smartphone to carry in your pocket every day.